The big-money players in the March 8 Los Angeles Unified school board elections are Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the United Teachers Los Angeles union.

Their independent campaign fundraising and spending will dominate the messages voters hear about the candidates running for four seats on the seven-member Board of Education.

But voters may listen to the candidates themselves in just-posted interviews on The Times election page. All but one responded to questions posed by The Times. Those backed by neither the union nor Villaraigosa also were asked to participate.

The Times election page links to interviews with candidates in other races and to election-related news stories and blog items, as well as endorsements from The Times' editorial board.

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Voter guide: March 8 Los Angeles Election

LAUSD to recommend closing of charter school

A March runoff will decide who leads the L.A. teachers union

-- Howard Blume

Today is the deadline to register to vote in March 8 elections that will be held in Los Angeles and 29 other 30 Southland cities.

L.A. voters will consider 10 ballot measures and candidates for seven open seats on the City Council, as well as a handful of school board and community college offices. To get the latest election news, candidate comments and editorial endorsements, check out The Times' elections page.

Voters can register or re-register by filling out and mailing forms that can be picked up at libraries, post offices, fire stations, Department of Motor Vehicles offices and other public buildings. Those forms must be postmarked Feb. 22.

Voter registration is also required for residents of the various communities outside Los Angeles who want to cast ballots for the Los Angeles Unified School District board of education or the Los Angeles Community College District board of trustees.

Ballots are also available in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog and Vietnamese. For more information, call (213) 978-0444 or toll-free at (888) 873-1000, or check the Los Angeles City Election Division’s website.

In the tiny city of Bell, meanwhile, voters will elect three City Council members and decide whether to recall four others in the wake of a salary scandal that has made national headlines.

And in the Orange County city of San Clemente, voters will consider a development proposed for the North Beach area. For details, check the Orange County election website.

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Voter guide: March 8 Los Angeles Election

-- David Zahniser at Los Angeles City Hall

Los Angeles Councilman Bernard C. Parks and opponent Forescee Hogan-Rowles traded jabs Saturday at a candidate forum in Leimert Park, where Parks defended his six-figure pension and compensation package and Hogan-Rowles brushed off accusations that she was a pawn of organized labor.

Hogan-Rowles, who has received heavy backing from city employee unions, has emerged as a strong challenger to Parks, who is seeking his third term representing the 8th District in South Los Angeles. The election will be held March 8.

Parks has questioned Hogan-Rowles’ readiness for the job as well as her grasp of the severity of the city’s budget crisis. In his latest campaign mailing, the former city police chief accused Hogan-Rowles of being the puppet of the Los Angeles Police Protective League -– a group that Parks has long quarreled with. The police union, which represents about 9,000 rank-and-file officers, has spent nearly $125,000 to boost Hogan-Rowles’ candidacy.

“I don’t see any strings here,” Hogan-Rowles told the members of the Cherrywood/Leimert Block Club inside a meeting hall of Transfiguration Catholic Church on Martin Luther King Boulevard. “I am nobody’s puppet.”

The two candidates appeared at different times, avoiding a face-to-face confrontation like the one last weekend hosted by the Park Mesa Heights Community Council. At that debate, they were joined by a third candidate, Jabari Jumaane.

Hogan-Rowles spoke first Saturday, repeating charges that it was hypocritical of Parks to call for scaling back city pension benefits for future hires, while collecting his own $265,000 police pension and a $178,789 council salary.

An audience member gave Parks a chance to respond to those attacks later when he asked whether the election was about candidates’ salaries or what they were going to do for the public. The district includes roughly 260,000 residents.

Parks, 67, called the criticisms “ludicrous” and noted that he didn’t set council salaries or the pension he was awarded from his service in the police department. When Parks asked how many people in the audience would be willing to “start from scratch” -- giving up their pension and benefits when they moved to a new job, only one man raised his hand.

“I worked 38 years in the police department.  I think I deserve the pension I earned,” said Parks, as some of his listeners nodded. “I think I should not leave it to the side and tell my family -- ‘Don’t worry about that, we’ll give it away because I’m young enough and healthy enough to keep working.’ ”

Parks and Hogan-Rowles, who runs a nonprofit that offers financial services in low-income communities, also debated whether the councilman had done enough to recruit new businesses, including to the 22-acre project known as Marlton Square -- at the site of a former shopping plaza that has been a community eyesore for decades.

Los Angeles City Council candidate Rudy Martinez was taken to a hospital Thursday night after collapsing shortly after an appearance at a candidate forum with his opponent, Councilman Jose Huizar.

Martinez, 44, fell to his knees in the parking lot of the El Sereno Senior Center, said campaign spokesman George Gonzalez. He was taken to Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena shortly after 10 p.m. and stayed overnight for observation.

He was released Friday at around 7:30 a.m. The doctor who treated Martinez said the collapse was the result of stress and exhaustion and advised him to rest for a day, Gonzalez said.

“He has been walking [door to door] at a furious pace over the last three weeks. We believe it finally caught up to him,” he added.

Veteran union leader Julie Washington finished first in the race for president of United Teachers Los Angeles, but fell short of avoiding a runoff in balloting to head the union, officials announced Thursday night.

Washington, a union vice president, claimed 44.8% of the vote. In second place and securing a spot in the runoff was Warren Fletcher, a teacher at the City of Angels alternative school, with 37.3% of the vote.

Six other candidates vied for the top office. The only other aspirant with more than 4% of the vote was Mat Taylor, the lead union representative for much of South Los Angeles, with 8.7% of the vote.

Ballots for the next and final round of voting will be mailed on March 7 to UTLA members and must be returned on or before March 29. UTLA represents teachers at schools operated by the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest school system.

The sister of a Los Angeles Police Department officer killed in the line of duty 32 years ago said Thursday that she wanted City Councilman Jose Huizar to stop using her brother’s badge as an issue in his March 8 reelection campaign.

Karen Kubly, a retired LAPD officer herself, sent an e-mail Wednesday to Huizar saying it was “hurtful and most disrespectful” for him to use the badge in his campaign against businessman Rudy Martinez without notifying her family first.

Huizar sent a mailer to voters last week focusing on a 2005 LAPD investigation into Martinez’s possession of a badge with David Kubly’s number. That mailer includes excerpts from a heavily redacted report on the investigation that was never provided to Kubly’s family.

In an interview, Kubly said Huizar had used her brother for political gain and to make himself “look like a better man.” And in her e-mail, a copy of which was provided to the Los Angeles Times, she told Huizar that her family had never recovered from the loss of David Kubly, who was killed in 1979 while trying to apprehend a robbery suspect.

“Your campaign has never contacted our family to talk about this matter," she wrote, "but just used David’s precious memory to tarnish the Martinez campaign.”

Huizar campaign consultant Parke Skelton said the councilman would meet Monday with Kubly and follow “whatever her family’s wishes are.” He also said that Huizar had relied on the union that represents rank-and-file police officers to inform Kubly’s family that a badge story would be written by The Times two weeks ago.

“We talked to the L.A. Police Protective League about the sensitive issues involved, and they said they had a relationship with Mrs. Kubly,” Skelton said.

Kubly's full e-mail appears at the end of this post.

As widely expected, most of the campaign money in the March 8 election for the Los Angeles Board of Education is coming from outsiders and not the candidates themselves.

The biggest player is a committee supported by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Next in line is United Teachers Los Angeles, the teachers union for the nation’s second-largest school system.

The Villaraigosa-backed Coalition for School Reform is supporting incumbents Tamar Galatzan and Richard Vladovic as well as Luis Sanchez, who is running to fill the one open seat among four on the ballot.

The Coalition can't be called the "mayor’s committee" because state law prohibits the mayor, as a political officeholder, from exerting control. But that hasn’t stopped the mayor from fundraising for the effort. And the committee was formed solely to support the candidates he’s backing. All told, the committee has spent $410,696, according to the latest filings. It has more than $1 million still in reserve.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas threw his support behind Los Angeles City Council candidate Forescee Hogan-Rowles at a late afternoon fundraiser in Hancock Park Sunday, calling her “very capable,” “very well-regarded” with strong credentials to lead the 8th District. 

Ridley-Thomas’s backing of Hogan-Rowles, who is attempting to unseat Councilman Bernard C. Parks in his South Los Angeles district, is all but certain to add heat to an already scorching feud between Parks and Ridley-Thomas.

The two men waged a bitter battle for the 2nd District seat on the Board of Supervisors in 2008. Ridley-Thomas won by double digits, aided by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, which spent an unprecedented $8.5 million to help his effort. Hogan-Rowles shares some of the same allies. The labor federation has spent more than $81,000 so far in independent expenditures on her behalf. 

“It is time, after a long time of eight years of people registering serious displeasure and discontent,” Ridley-Thomas said, “that we do the positive thing, the forward-looking thing, the right thing and to call someone to represent that district who has a feel for that district, who has the heart of that district, who identifies with the constituents of that district, in contrast to one who positions himself otherwise.” 

The Los Angeles County district attorney's office declined to file charges Friday against Michael Trujillo, a campaign consultant who wrote an e-mail last week promising to put a "political bullet" in the forehead of City Council candidate Rudy Martinez.

Trujillo, 32, was working for incumbent Councilman Jose Huizar at the time he sent the e-mail. Martinez, who is running to unseat Huizar in the March 8 election, responded by filing a police report about the e-mail.

Trujillo promised in his e-mail that Huizar's campaign would unleash the "dogs of Satan" on Martinez. He also described Martinez as a "dead rat" who would be sent back to the "vile bag of tripe he emanated from."

Nevertheless, prosecutors who reviewed the e-mail said there was not enough evidence that Trujillo's words should be taken as a threat. "In addition, there is insufficient evidence that the e-mail communication authored by the suspect, under the circumstances in which it was made," was intended to be conveyed to the alleged victim," the D.A.'s report states.

Huizar and school board member Richard Vladovic, who is also running for reelection, fired Trujillo last week over the e-mail. Trujillo also has worked for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the lieutenant governor campaign of Councilwoman Janice Hahn and the public relations firm California Strategies.

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Voter guide: March 8 Los Angeles Election

-- David Zahniser at Los Angeles City Hall

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry said Thursday that the more than $100,000 worth of spending on behalf of a rival of Councilman Bernard C. Parks by the union that represents city utility workers amounts to a “massive, ridiculous tantrum” by the group’s president, Brian D’Arcy.

D’Arcy, the head of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 18, clashed with Parks last year over a proposed ballot measure that would have allowed the City Council to assert greater control over the retirement benefits earned by Department of Water and Power workers, who have an independent pension system. When that proposal was discussed in late October, workers from D’Arcy’s union packed the City Council chambers to protest and the idea was shelved.  

At a luncheon hosted by the Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum on Thursday, Perry said it was unfortunate that other members of the City Council are “afraid” of D’Arcy.

“I’m a little tired of people being intimidated,” said Perry, who represents part of downtown L.A. and South Los Angeles. “I don’t take well to that kind of behavior. And it needs to stop.”